5

IntroductionThe Experience of Space

At the Beginning of Modernism

Furniture and First Architectural Works, 1920–37Furniture Designs at the BauhausInterior and Furniture Designs in BerlinHarnischmacher House, Wiesbaden, Germany, 1932Doldertal Apartment Houses, Zurich, Switzerland, 1933–6Architecture and Furniture Designs in LondonGane’s Pavilion, Bristol, England, 1936

Making a Modern Tradition

Houses, 1937–50Gropius House, Lincoln, Massachusetts, 1937–8Hagerty House, Cohasset, Massachusetts, 1937–8Breuer House Lincoln, Lincoln, Massachusetts, 1938–9Frank House, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1938–40Chamberlain Cottage, Wayland, Massachusetts, 1940–1Geller House I, Lawrence, Long Island, New York, 1944–6Robinson House, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1946–8Breuer House New Canaan I, New Canaan, Connecticut, 1947–8MoMA Exhibition House, New York, New York, 1948–9

Constructing with Elemental Forms

Public Buildings, 1950–60UNESCO Headquarters, Paris, France, 1952–8De Bijenkorf Department Store, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 1953–7United States Embassy, The Hague, the Netherlands, 1954–8Van Leer Office Building, Amstelveen, the Netherlands, 1957–8Hunter College Buildings, Bronx, New York, 1955–9

Perfecting the Types

Houses, 1950–60Breuer House New Canaan II, New Canaan, Connecticut, 1951Caesar Cottage, Lakeville, Connecticut, 1952Starkey House, Duluth, Minnesota, 1954–5Members’ Housing, Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, New Jersey, 1955–6Gagarin House I, Litchfield, Connecticut, 1955–7Hooper House II, Baltimore, Maryland, 1956–9Staehelin House, Zurich, Switzerland, 1956–9

5 259 260 266 268 270 272 314 317

6 339 340 341 345 346 348

7 381 382 385 387 389 391

429

434

438

400

447

17

1 21 24 31 53 55 57 58

2 75 76 77 79 82 83 105 107 109 112

3 149 152 157 159 160 162

4 203 205 206 208 211 212 229 230

Clarifying the Themes

Public Buildings, 1960–70St. John’s Abbey and University, Collegeville, Minnesota, 1953–68Annunciation Priory of the Sisters of St. Benedict and University of Mary,

Bismarck, North Dakota, 1954–63New York University, University Heights, Bronx, New York, 1956–61IBM Research Center, La Gaude, France, 1960–70Resort Town of Flaine, Haute-Savoie, France, 1960–9St. Francis de Sales Church, Muskegon, Michigan, 1961–6Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York, 1963–6

Transforming the Types

Houses, 1960–76McMullen Beach House, Mantoloking, New Jersey, 1960Koerfer House, Ascona, Ticino, Switzerland, 1963–7Stillman House II, Litchfield, Connecticut, 1965–6Geller House II, Lawrence, Long Island, New York, 1967–9Sayer House, Glanville, Calvados, France, 1972–3

Variations on Selected Themes

Public Buildings, 1970–80Armstrong Rubber Company, New Haven, Connecticut, 1965–70University of Massachusetts Campus Center, Amherst, Massachusetts, 1965–70IBM Offices, Laboratories and Manufacturing, Boca Raton, Florida, 1967–72Convent of the Sisters of Divine Providence, Baldegg, Switzerland, 1967–72Atlanta Central Public Library, Atlanta, Georgia, 1971–80

ConclusionLast of the First Moderns/First of the Last Moderns

Complete Architectural Works

Selected Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

21

1At the Beginning of ModernismFurniture and First Architectural Works, 1920–1937

Marcel Lajos Breuer (called Lajkó by all who knew him) was born on 22 May 1902 in the Hungarian town of Pécs, at that time a regional center with a population of 42,000, located near the west banks of the Danube River in the western portion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. With its mining, industry, and the oldest university in Hungary, the city of Pécs was the most important economic and cultural center in western Hungary during the eighteen years that Breuer lived there. In 1919, at the end of World War I, Pécs became one of five primary provincial centers of the newly established Hungarian Republic, and the Hungarian border with Yugoslavia was located just to the south of Pécs, which is 100 miles (160 km) to the south of Budapest, and almost the same distance to the east of Zagreb, Croatia, and to the northwest of Belgrade, Serbia.

Breuer’s father was a dental technician, allowing the family to live comfortably and to engage in the progressive, intellectual culture of Pécs. Breuer grew up speaking Hungarian, as well as some German, and while his parents were Jewish, Breuer later decided, at age twenty-four, to renounce all religion.1 Breuer’s father and mother were interested in having their three children engage in the arts and culture, and they sub-scribed to several art periodicals, including The Studio, an English publication presenting recent international developments in fine arts, applied arts, and architecture, which was widely read throughout Europe and the United States.2 Steeped in this context, Breuer decided as a youth that he would become an artist—either a painter or a sculptor. At home, he painted, sketched, and modeled, and at secondary school he enjoyed mechanical drawing. An oil painting by Breuer, depicting the roofscapes of Pécs and the surrounding hillsides, remains from 1917. At the end of World War I, from 1918 to 1920, Breuer remembers Pécs being occupied by the Serbs and Yugoslavs, stating that he and his family felt “completely isolated. Consequently I had no knowl-

1 Christopher Wilk, Marcel Breuer: Furniture and Interiors (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1981), 15; in a footnote based on materials in the Breuer Collection, Box 10, Wilks notes that in 1926, Breuer filed papers with the Official Provincial Rabbinate in Dessau declaring that he did not wish to be considered Jewish.

2 Wilk, op. cit., 15.

edge of modern art.”3 However, due to his early and ongoing exposure to international journals such as The Studio, Breuer could not have been entirely unaware of the dramatic changes happening in the arts and archi-tecture at that time.

In spring 1920, at the age of eighteen, Breuer received a scholarship to attend the Akademie der bildenden Künste (Academy of Fine Arts) in Vienna, one of the greatest cultural centers of the world. In the years before World War I, Vienna had been the context for many of the most profound developments in early modernism. Before the turn of the century, the painter Gustav Klimt had broken away from the classical Imperial Academy and established the “Seccession,” which soon included a number of architects such as Joseph Maria Olbrich and Josef Hoffmann. The Secessionist school of architecture, as well as its critics, were both inspired by the work of Otto Wagner, architect of many of the Vienna city transit stations and bridges, as well as masterpieces of early modern architecture such as the Post Office Savings Bank and the Am Steinhof Church. Hoffmann’s establishment of the Wiener Werkstätte, and the relation of many of the Secessionist architects’ works to Art Nouveau, along with their employment of newly invented ornament, was severely criticized by the architect Adolf Loos and the cultural critic Karl Kraus, whose scathing denunciations of what they saw as cultural degeneracy appeared in issues of Loos’s journal, Das Andere (The Other). Loos’s own architecture, which had restrained exteriors with complexly inter-locking interior spaces, was closely related to the Arts and Crafts movement, as documented in The Studio. Among parallel cultural developments in Vienna before World War I, there was Arnold Schönberg in music, Sigmund Freud in psychology, Robert Musil in literature, Ernst Mach in science, and Ludwig Wittgenstein in philosophy, to name only the most well known.4

Despite his high expectations, Breuer was deeply dis-appointed when he arrived at the Academy of Fine Arts, finding the students uninterested and the teachers uninspiring, everyone being occupied with discussions of aesthetic theory and not with the actual making of art. He walked out of the Academy the same day, abandon-ing his scholarship and seeking out a position as a designer with an architect and cabinetmaker in Vienna, where he stayed for two months. As Breuer recalled, there were many Hungarians in Vienna in 1920, includ-ing a number of exiles from the failed Hungarian Communist revolution of the year before. During his

3 Isabelle Hyman, Marcel Breuer Architect (New York: Abrams, 2001), 40.

4 This rich and complex period has been succinctly summarized in Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973).

2322

brief time in Vienna, Breuer “studied with great interest art journals in the cafés,” and he recalls experiencing firsthand some of the city’s important modern buildings. However, he would later characterize these two months as the unhappiest time of his life, almost despairing until one day his friend from Pécs, Fred Forbàt, a recent ar-chitecture school graduate, gave Breuer “a little brochure from the Weimar Bauhaus with the emblem ‘Return of the Craftsman’ and with a woodcut by Lyonel Feininger.”5Knowing nothing more about this new school than what was written in the four-page brochure, Breuer decided to go to Weimar and enroll in the Bauhaus.

When Breuer, then age nineteen, arrived in Weimar to join the Bauhaus, the school was only a year old, having been founded the previous year by Walter Gropius, the architect of the Fagus Factory (1911) and the adminis-tration building of the Deutscher Werkbund exhibit of 1914, both of which have been recognized as early landmarks of modernism. The Werkbund had been founded to develop close relationships between art and industry in Germany, and one of its founders, the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde, had stepped down as director of the Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts in 1915, and subsequently urged that Gropius be appointed to replace him. In 1919, Gropius established the Staatli-ches Bauhaus Weimar as a combination of the Academy of Art and the School of Arts and Crafts, “in conjunction with a newly affiliated department of architecture,” as declared in the four-page brochure Breuer was given. More than anything else, it was Gropius’s “emblematic” vision for the school as a place where the artist and craftsman were one and the same, as stated in the 1919 brochure, that had drawn Breuer and other students to Weimar:

The ultimate aim of all visual arts is the complete building! … Today the arts exist in isolation, from which they can be rescued only through the conscious, cooperative effort of all craftsmen…Architects, sculptors, painters, we all must return to the crafts! For art is not a “profession.” There is no essential difference between the artist and the craftsman. The artist is an exalted craftsman … But proficiency in a craft is essential to every artist. Therein lies the prime source of creative imagination. Let us then create a new guild of craftsmen …6

5 Breuer quotations are from Hyman, op. cit., 39–41. Barry Bergdoll notes that Forbàt, who was trained in Budapest and Munich, moved to Weimar at the same time as Breuer, in 1920, working as a Bauhaus architect with Walter Gropius: “Bauhaus Multiplied,” in Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 43.

6 Hans Wingler, The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969), 31–2.

Yet Gropius’s definition of the school as including architectural education, stated in the 1919 brochure, would not become a reality until 1927. In addition, his medieval, guild-based conception of education, moving from apprenticeship to journeyman to “young master,” and involving the engagement of art with industry, was being engaged only partially by the Bauhaus faculty Breuer found when he arrived at the school. Besides Gropius, the faculty then included the painter Lyonel Feininger, the ceramicist Gerhard Marcks, and the painter Johannes Itten. As if the diversity of viewpoints represented by the rapidly growing Bau-haus faculty was not enough, Theo van Doesburg, the founder of the Dutch De Stijl movement, had also arrived in Weimar that same year with the express purpose of setting up a competing “school,” giving lectures every evening to the Bauhaus students, who attended in large numbers. The sculptor Oskar Schlemmer, who joined the Bauhaus faculty at this time, wrote how van Doesburg was “drawing the Bauhaus students under his spell—especially those interested chiefly in architecture, who deplore the Bauhaus’s deficiency in this area … He rejects craftsmanship (the focus of the Bauhaus) in favor of the most modern tool: the ma-chine. [He argues for] exclusive and consistent use of only the horizontal and the vertical in art and architecture . . .”7

The summer of 1920, when Breuer arrived, coincided with the first time Bauhaus students were taught the Preliminary Course, or “Vorkurs,” involving six months of instruction imparting the fundamentals and principles of form, material, and design process, later known as “basic design.” One of the most important contributions to art and architecture education to emerge from the Bauhaus, the Preliminary Course was initially taught by Itten, who encouraged individual intuitive develop-ment (including allowing students to propose their own color palettes), while also engaging the spiritual. Itten’s personal beliefs about the fundamentally mystical and subjective nature of artistic creation led him to oppose the close relationship of art education and industrial production that Gropius advocated. Later that autumn, the painter Paul Klee was asked to join the faculty of the Bauhaus as a Master, and he described attending Itten’s Preliminary Course class, giving a detailed account of the students’ typical experiences in the early Bauhaus, in a letter to his wife Lily in January 1921:

Yesterday I devoted myself entirely to the Bauhaus and had myself shown over the place for the first

7 Oskar Schlemmer, letter to Otto Meyer-Amden, March 1922; in The Bauhaus: Masters and Students by Themselves, Frank Whitford, ed. (London: Conran Octopus, 1992), 127.

AT THE BEGINNING OF MODERNISM

time. In the morning Itten was working with the Preliminary Course class … Wearing a wine-red suit, the Master was standing with a group of girls and boys and asking them to show him work. He gave one group a writing exercise based on the text “Little Mary Sat on a Stone.” They were only allowed to begin writing when they clearly felt the spirit of the song … We went into the studio next door, a vast room. Along one wall were supports holding experiments in the use of materials. They looked like the bastardized offspring of couplings between the art of savag-es and children’s toys. Along the other three walls were tables at which the apprentices sat on three-legged piano stools … Everyone had a huge piece of charcoal in his hand and a pad of cheap paper on a drawing board in front of him … After he’d walked up and down once or twice he moved toward an easel and a pad of paper. He grasped a stick of charcoal, gath-ered his body together as though charging himself with energy and then suddenly made two movements, one after the other. We saw a shape formed by two energetic strokes, vertical and parallel, on the topmost sheet of paper. The students were instructed to copy it. The Master criticized the work, had one student demon-strate, controlling the attitude of his body. Then he demanded that it be done while beating time; then he had the same exercise performed with everyone standing. It seems that what’s intended is a kind of body massage in order to train the machine to function with feeling. Similarly new elementary forms … were created and copied … with several explanations about why and about the kind of expression. Then he said something about the wind, had some of the students stand up and express the feelings inspired by the wind and storm. Afterward he gave the exercise: the representation of the storm. For that he allowed about ten minutes and then inspected the results. With that he criticized. After the criticism work resumed. One sheet of paper after another was torn up and fell to the ground. Several worked with great energy so that several sheets of paper were used up at the same time. After they had all grown rather tired he let the members of the Preliminary Course take the exercise home with them for further practice. In the evening at five o’clock “Analysis” was held in a large room built like an amphitheatre … Once again the Master walked up and down by

way of preparation and charging his batteries. Then he presented the formal elements that he wished to discuss in the picture by Matisse, La Danse, which was later projected [on the screen at the front of the room]. He then had the students draw the compositional scheme of this picture, once even in the dark. Then he had them add to this scheme after the model, sometimes telling them to copy a single figure. Again and again he walked up and down the steps of the room, inspecting, criticizing.8

Klee’s description is paralleled by Breuer’s later recollections that Itten’s class involved “doing rhythmic movements, designing in rhyme, reinterpreting the Old Masters of art, studying the textures of materials, and expressing our different feelings in a direct man- ner.”9 While Itten would leave the Bauhaus in 1923, before Breuer had completed his studies, his influence would remain in the teaching of the Preliminary Course, the one common class in which all Bauhaus students were required to enroll. After Itten’s departure, the Hungarian Constructivist painter, photographer, and graphic designer László Moholy-Nagy took over the teaching of the Preliminary Course. Josef Albers, another student who entered the Bauhaus at the same time as Breuer, would later join what was by that time a team of teachers for the Preliminary Course. Albers’s teaching at the Bauhaus, at Black Mountain College, and at Yale University, which included the training of the body to draw with feeling (inspired in many ways by Itten’s teaching of the Preliminary Course), would have the most profoundly formative affect on generations of artists and architects.10

Klee’s class notes from the period when Breuer was a new student at the Bauhaus, wherein Klee endeavored to teach students “how to see” and how to shape move-ment through space, are documented in The Thinking Eye and The Nature of Nature, which are among the most important books on modern design education.11 Breuer considered Klee to be one of the two most influential teachers he ever had, and he recalled how, during a lecture at the blackboard, Klee “drew an arrow pointing

8 Paul Klee, letter to his wife, 16 January 1921; Whitford, op. cit., 54–5. This letter is also quoted in Giulio Carlo Argan’s Preface for Klee’s The Thinking Eye (see note 11 below).

9 Breuer interview, quoted in William Jordy, “The Aftermath of the Bauhaus in America: Gropius, Mies and Breuer,” in The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930–1960, D. Fleming and B. Bailyn, eds. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 506; also quoted in Hyman, op. cit., 41.

10 Albers’s post-Bauhaus teaching is documented in Mary Emma Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987); and Frederick Horowitz and Barbara Danilowitz, Josef Albers: To Open Eyes (London: Phaidon, 2006).

11 Paul Klee, Paul Klee Notebooks Volume 1: The Thinking Eye (London: Lund Humphries, 1961; originally published in German in 1956); Paul Klee Notebooks Volume 2: The Nature of Nature (London: Lund Humphries, 1973; originally published in German in 1970).

34 35

ti 1a wood slat chair, 1922

Armchair with plywood, 1922

Plywood children’s chair, ti 3a, and table, 1922

Dressing table and chair, Haus am Horn, 1923

Woman’s bedroom, axonometric, Haus am Horn, 1923

FURNITURE DESIGNS AT THE BAUHAUS

36 37

Bauwelt apartment building competition, 1923; model

Apartment building, Weimar, 1923; elevation

B3 Wassily tubular steel armchair, designed 1925; Gavina version, 1962

Bent chromed steel tube frame for B3 Wassily armchair

B3 Wassily armchair, 1925

FURNITURE DESIGNS AT THE BAUHAUS

38 39

B9 tubular steel nesting tables and stools, 1925-6

B11 armchair, steel, wood, and fabric, 1928

B18 table, tubular steel and glass, 1927–8

B21 typing table, steel and plywood, 1928

FURNITURE DESIGNS AT THE BAUHAUS

B9 stools and wood dining tables, Bauhaus canteen, 1927

40 41

B64 Cesca armchair

Ise and Walter Gropius in their Bauhaus apartment, 1927; with B3 Wassily chairs

B33 cantilevered tubular steel chair, 1927

B32 Cesca chair, cane seat and back, 1928; Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, photography, and Herbert Bayer, graphic design

Cantilevered steel tube chair frame experiment, welded by plumber, c. 1926

B35 lounge chair, steel, wood, and fabric, 1928–9FURNITURE DESIGNS AT THE BAUHAUS

259

5Clarifying the ThemesPublic Buildings, 1960–70

In the religious, institutional, and commercial build-ings that were built to his designs in the 1960s, Breuer evolved his characteristic emphases on the expression of structure, and on surface depth and modulation of the building skin. Breuer held that clarity was an essential quality of architecture, and that it was inextricably linked to the expression of structure and function. In 1964, he stated: “To us clarity means the definite expression of the purpose of a building and a sincere expression of its structure. One can regard this sincerity as a sort of moral duty, but I feel that for the designer it is above all a trial of strength that sets the seal of success on his achievement; and the sense of achievement is a very basic instinct.” While the structure had been at least partially clad, and sometimes completely hidden in a number of his earlier works, by the time he made this statement in 1964, it is clear that Breuer shared with his contem-porary Louis Kahn the belief in the moral imperative to express structure. Like Kahn, Breuer also embraced structure as a fundamental component of the design of a building: “I like to see structure, to emphasize it, and to develop it—not just as a means to a solution. It is also a principle and a passion.”1

The emergence of visible structure, and its “sin-cere expression” in Breuer’s work, was paralleled and made possible by his engagement, beginning in the 1950s, of reinforced cast-in-place structural and finish concrete as his building material of choice. In this way, as Breuer said: “The structure itself became art.”2 With the buildings completed in the 1960s, Breuer established himself as the American master of reinforced concrete—extending Le Corbusi-er’s efforts in developing an aesthetic of board-formed béton brut. Regarding reinforced concrete, Breuer believed “no other material has the potential of such complete and convincing fusion between structure, enclosure, and surface—between architecture and

1 Breuer, 1964 interview in Paul Heyer, Architects on Architecture (New York: Walker and Co., 1966), 265, 271.

2 Breuer, notes from lectures, Marcel Breuer: Buildings and Projects, 1921–1961 (New York: Praeger, 1962), 258.

detail, between the minute great form and the great small particle.”3 Of equal importance was Breuer’s parallel engagement of the rapidly developing pre-cast-concrete industry during the 1950s, which began employing steam-curing, vibration, and steel forms in factory settings, producing high-quality surface fin-ishes. While Kahn aggressively employed the abil-ity of the precasting industry to fabricate prestressed and post-stressed concrete structural components, Breuer was more interested in engaging the possibil-ities of making building skins from prefabricated, repetitive, sculpted precast-concrete elements.

Based on his critique of the glass curtain wall skin of modern architecture, which had become ubiquitous by the 1950s, Breuer evolved a highly plastic sculptural interpretation of precast-concrete construction, used as facade and structural cladding, to create strong shadow patterns and sun shielding. In 1966, Breuer described his reasoning for employing precast-concrete for facades, noting how the building structure, insula-tion and sun shading, and mechanical heating-cooling components of contemporary construction were al-most impossible to incorporate into the iconic modern glass exterior wall:

The glass wall—as an expression of modern technology—seems to conflict with technology itself. The search for an exterior which would integrate the demands of an enclosure goes parallel with a new approach to the technique and aesthetic of precast-concrete. Both lead us to architectural solutions which can be called “molded,” and which have the characteristics of a facade unattainable in any other familiar mod-ern material. The large prefabricated panels can be designed for a variety of technical require-ments: they may be load-bearing and structur-al; they may offer chases and hollows for pipes, ducts and heating-cooling equipment; they may form projections for sun protection; they may be solid or may contain large openings; they may combine all of these. What about aesthet-ics? A new depth of facade is emerging; a three- dimensionality with a resulting greatly expand-ed vocabulary of architectural expression.4

3 Breuer, Architectural Record, December 1963; Tician Papachristou, Marcel Breuer: New Buildings and Projects (New York: Praeger, 1970), 22.

4 Breuer, Architectural Record, April 1966; Papachristou, op. cit., 13.

396 397ARMSTRONG RUBBER COMPANY, NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT, 1965–70

Armstrong Rubber Company; view of complex from north

398 399

Armstrong Rubber Company; floor plans of lower building (above) and tower (below)

ARMSTRONG RUBBER COMPANY, NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT, 1965-70

Armstrong Rubber Company; south elevation

Armstrong Rubber Company; recent view from northwest

Armstrong Rubber Company; view of front facade with concrete sign

400 401NEW YORK UNIVERSITY TECHNOLOGY II, BRONX, NEW YORK, 1964–70ARMSTRONG RUBBER COMPANY, NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT, 1965–70

Armstrong Rubber Company; recent view of detail of sign and building beyond

New York University Technology II; view of classroom wing from street

New York University Technology II; view of court above library, laboratory facade

New York University Technology II; floor plans, typical upper floor (above) and ground floor (below)